Community driven development in the drylands- evidence from karnataka watershed development agency intervention

In the examination of participatory development projects, existing contributions have demonstrated how aid resources are often captured by local elites. This paper examines the impementation of a Department for International Development funded Karnataka Watershed Development Agency project in Southern India. The project area had witnessed poor rainfall and crop failures before the commencement of the project and the farmers were pessimistic about the retruns that they would get from farming. In such a scenario, farmers found that the short-term gains from undertaking the soil and water conservation treatment and colluding with the contractors and compromising on the quality of the work appeared to be more attractive to the heavily discounted long term gains from efficient soil and water conservation treatment. Despite the top management in the Karnataka Watershed Development Agency being aware of such malpractices occuring during the early stages of the intervention, no effective mechanisms were put in place to detect and penalise such actions. The evidence from our study suggests that provisioning by small groups could also lead to collective bad outcomes.